Meaning
A strong liking or weakness for sugary foods and drinks. Someone with a sweet tooth craves sweets, chocolate, and desserts, and the phrase can also stretch loosely to any strong preference, as in a sweet tooth for gossip or old records. Standard and neutral across all registers, almost always framed as have a sweet tooth; the adjective sweet-toothed is equally standard. Regional use: General English.
Origin
One of the oldest food idioms in English, and here the popular medieval story is actually right. Etymonline dates sweet tooth, fondness for sugary things, to the late 1300s, originally written swete toth in Middle English, explaining that tooth then carried the sense of taste or appetite; the same dictionary's entry for tooth records the figurative sense of appetite or bodily desire from the late fourteenth century in a family of expressions including colt's tooth, dry tooth, and toothsome. Merriam-Webster gives the first known use as the fourteenth century, and Collins places the origin between 1350 and 1400. What has narrowed is the meaning: the tooth in question meant appetite in general, not a literal molar, and Wiktionary still records both the weakness-for-sweets sense and the broader preference sense.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a sweet tooth for something
- have a sweet tooth
- sweet-toothed
Usage Examples
- My grandfather has a legendary sweet tooth and stashes shortbread in the garage freezer.
- The patisserie counter is dangerous territory for anyone cursed with a serious sweet tooth.
- I gave up sugar for the whole month, which is agony when your sweet tooth is this demanding.